About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the
occasion being the tercentenary of Milton's Aeropagitica -- a pamphlet,
it may be remembered, in defense of freedom of the press. Milton's famous
phrase about the sin of "killing" a book was printed on the leaflets advertising
the meeting which had been circulated beforehand.
There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech
which did deal with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India;
another said, hesitantly, and in very general terms, that liberty was a
good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws relating to obscenity
in literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defense of the
Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted
to the question of obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were
simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral liberty -- the liberty to discuss
sex questions frankly in print -- seemed to be generally approved, but
political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of several hundred
people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade,
there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press,
if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.
Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly
being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books which
have been "killed" in England and the United States during the war. In
its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favor of censorship.
There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea
of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one
side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and
on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.
Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself
thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.
The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of
the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio
and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books,
making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living
by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the
British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his
time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the
past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape.
Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind
of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down
from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.
But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side;
that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he's
in the right. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries,
the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed
up. A heretic -- political, moral, religious, or aesthetic -- was one who
refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the
words of the Revivalist hymn:
Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known
To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a "Don't" at the beginning
of each line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against
the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of
them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. "Daring
to stand alone" is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous.
The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by vague economic
forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its
defenders. It is with the second process that I am concerned here.
Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments
which are not worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing
and debating knows them off backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with
the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that
there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones,
but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is
undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness.
Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the
controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy
of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue
is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully
as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which
every observer necessarily suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying
that straightforward "reportage" is the only branch of literature that
matters: but I will try to show later that at every literary level, and
probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in more or less
subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies
in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case
as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth
is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis
may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded
as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, of either wanting to shut himself
up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own
personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt
to cling to unjustified privilege. The Catholic and the Communist are alike
in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each
of them tacitly claims that "the truth" has already been revealed, and
that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of "the
truth" and merely resists it out of selfish motives. In Communist literature
the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about "petty-bourgeois
individualism," "the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism," etc.,
and backed up by words of abuse such as "romantic" and "sentimental," which,
since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In
this way the controversy is maneuvered away from its real issue. One can
accept, and most enlightened people would accept, the Communist thesis
that pure freedom will only exist in a classless society, and that one
is most nearly free when one is working to bring such a society about.
But slipped in with this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist
Party is itself aiming at the establishment of the classless society, and
that in the U.S.S.R. this aim is actually on the way to being realized.
If the first claim is allowed to entail the second, there is almost no
assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But
meanwhile, the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means
the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be
obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. The familiar tirades
against "escapism" and "individualism," "romanticism," and so forth, are
merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of
history seem respectable.
Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one
had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some
extent -- for they were not of great importance in England -- against Fascists.
Today one has to defend it against Communists and "fellow-travelers." One
ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small English Communist
Party, but there can be no question about the poisonous effect of the Russian
mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it known facts are suppressed
and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history
of our times can ever be written. Let me give just one instance out of
the hundreds that could be cited. When Germany collapsed, it was found
that very large numbers of Soviet Russians -- mostly, no doubt, from non-political
motives -- had changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a
small but not negligible portion of the Russian prisoners and displaced
persons refused to go back to the U.S.S.R., and some of them, at least,
were repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists
on the spot, went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at the
same time Russophile publicists in England continued to justify the purges
and deportations of 1936-38 by claiming that the U.S.S.R. "had no quislings."
The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the
Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so
forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist
who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. -- sympathetic, that is, in the
way the Russians themselves would want him to be -- does have to acquiesce
in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have before me what
must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining
the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin,
but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others.
What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually scrupulous Communist
towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that
it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason
it were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating
Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful
to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been
committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen,
but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from
the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the
truth would be "inopportune" or would "play into the hands of" somebody
or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the
prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and
into the history books.
The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes
claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception.
It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still
continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased
to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend
to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now to deal
in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording
the true facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe,
be quite certain that this is not the case, because the mentality implied
by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the
past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable
as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something
to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a
theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to
be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible,
it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that
this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph
actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding
change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This
kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright
falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any
given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration
of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very
existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country
usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big
lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical
records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics
has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that
to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism.
A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably
set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense
held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be
disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already
there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific
textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact.
It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism
exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are
not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly
accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists
than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.
To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the
beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness,
and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates,
and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire
for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom
of all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects
of censorship, not on literature as a whole, but merely on one department
of political journalism. Granted that Soviet Russia constitutes a sort
of forbidden area in the British press, granted that issues like Poland,
the Spanish civil war, the Russo-German pact, and so forth, are debarred
from serious discussion, and that if you possess information that conflicts
with the prevailing orthodoxy you are expected to either distort it or
keep quiet about it -- granted all this, why should literature in the wider
sense be affected? Is every writer a politician, and is every book necessarily
a work of straightforward "reportage"? Even under the tightest dictatorship,
cannot the individual writer remain free inside his own mind and distill
or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will
be too stupid to recognize them? And in any case, if the writer himself
is in agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why should it have a cramping
effect on him? Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish
in societies in which there are no major conflicts of opinion and no sharp
distinction between the artist and his audience? Does one have to assume
that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an exceptional
person?
Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims
of totalitarianism, one meets with these arguments in one form or another.
They are based on a complete misunderstanding of what literature is, and
how -- one should perhaps say why -- it comes into being. They assume that
a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can switch
from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder changing
tunes. But after all, how is it that books ever come to be written? Above
a quite low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint
of one's contemporaries by recording experience. And so far as freedom
of expression is concerned, there is not much difference between a mere
journalist and the most "unpolitical" imaginative writer. The journalist
is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies
or suppress what seems to him important news; the imaginative writer is
unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point
of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make
his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own
mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes,
or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result
is that his creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem
by keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as a
genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our
own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are
near to the surface of everyone's consciousness. Even a single taboo can
have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always
the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the
forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is
deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric
poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society
that survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that
prose literature, of the kind that has existed during the past four hundred
years, must actually come to an end.
Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as
has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian.
Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes
were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and
the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism
and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that
prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy
and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines
are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted
on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to
be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes,
completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or
"fellow-traveler" has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany.
For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous
stew about "the horrors of Nazism" and to twist everything he wrote into
a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he
had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the
word "Nazi," at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his
vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the
morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism
was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for
the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat
different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment,
he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress
them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will
ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen
under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely
of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano
set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain,
vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly
one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an "age of
faith," when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is
not taken too seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be
possible, for large areas of one's mind to remain unaffected by what one
officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature
almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever enjoyed.
Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative
prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and
the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most serious thoughts
in a dead language which barley altered during a thousand years.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as
an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure
becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost
its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such
a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either
tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful
recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.
But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian
country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison
that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes.
Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy -- or even two orthodoxies, as
often happens -- good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish
civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience,
but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were
only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable
lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth
reading.
It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse
need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging
reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel
at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with, bureaucrats and other
"practical" men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much interested
in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying -- that is, what
his poem "means" if translated into prose -- is relatively unimportant,
even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and
is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary
purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations,
as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed,
as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether.
It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects
and avoid uttering heresies; and even when he does utter them, they may
escape notice. But above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily
and individual product. Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on
the other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be composed co-operatively
by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads were
originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed;
but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly
change in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions of
a ballad are ever quite the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse
communally. Someone begins to improvise, probably accompanying himself
on a musical instrument, somebody else chips in with a line or a rhyme
when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues until there
exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.
In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious
prose, in any case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement
of being part of a group is actually an aid to certain kinds of versification.
Verse -- and perhaps good verse of its own kind, though it would not be
the highest kind -- might survive under even the most inquisitorial regime.
Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been extinguished,
there would still be a need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads
celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery; and these
are the kinds of poems that can be written to order, or composed communally,
without necessarily lacking artistic value. Prose is a different matter,
since the prose writer cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without
killing his inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies, or
of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests
that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature
almost disappeared during the Hitler regime, and the case was not much
better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can judge by translations,
has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the revolution, though
some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian
novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for about
fifteen years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary
intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or have been
warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has produced
extraordinarily few books worth reading. Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems
to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially the novel.
During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been at once
good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot
be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a
good book in praise of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian
age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find
tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence
or death. Prose literature as we know it is the product of rationalism,
of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the destruction
of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer,
the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In
the future it is possible that a new kind of literature, not involving
individual feeling or truthful observation, may arise, but no such thing
is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture
that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary
art will perish with it.
Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to
speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian
society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique
reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now
whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the
need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend
anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other
recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded
by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational
fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that
reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.
But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film
and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism.
The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory
process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of
artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features
are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner
of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely
a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors.
So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government
departments. Even more machine-like is the production of short stories,
serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer
abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you
ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot,
supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish
you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct
plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and
situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce
ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the
literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were
still felt to be necessary. Imagination -- even consciousness, so far as
possible -- would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would
be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through
so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product
than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying
that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish
would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature
of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own
society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of
free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong
sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force.
You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it
in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning
of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom
liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter
one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic,
and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too
sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious
attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed
to that particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same
kind. But at any rate the Russian myth is there, and the corruption it
causes stinks. When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently
at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their
cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the
uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction
of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for
the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country
which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats
them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such
as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers, on the other
hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like
Ilya Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only
thing which is of any value to the writer as such -- his freedom of expression
-- is taken away from him. Some, at least, of the English scientists who
speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities to be enjoyed by scientists
in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their reflection appears
to be: "Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer."
They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept
of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because
it needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively
well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole, offered no
resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most autocratic
ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of
the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need
to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored,
so long as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing
the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can
even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, when
the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to
safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind
of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter
of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers
systematically falsified.
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting
and architecture, it is -- as I have tried to show -- certain that literature
is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any
country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts
the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification
of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of
this. No tirades against "individualism" and the "ivory tower," no pious
platitudes to the effect that "true individuality is only attained through
identification with the community," can get over the fact that a bought
mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another,
literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes something
totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary
creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination,
like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist
who denies that fact -- and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet
Union contains or implies such a denial -- is, in effect, demanding his
own destruction.
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